A/N More of our rom-spy-dramedy. A longish chapter. Thanks so much for reading and responding. I have been finishing the story (and am now done with it except for some revisions) and so have been a little slower than usual to respond to reviews and PMs, but I am nearly caught up. Drop me a line.

Thanks to michaelfmx for his continued, excellent beta work. All mistakes are mine.

Don't own Chuck. No money made.

Miss Trust?

Later Friday Night, Sept. 1, 2017 (Labor Day Weekend)

Main Campus, Commonwealth College

CHAPTER 3 Muddy Waters

Casey drove away, leaving Sarah standing in the parking lot with Chuck. Chuck glanced at her and then at the Miata.

"Nice car." She smiled and laughed against her will. She did like the car, although she had gotten rid of the Porsche she loved before she bought it. Driving a Porsche on an Assistant Professor's salary would have drawn unnecessary attention. The Mazda drew some, but it was within the bounds of possibility, especially when her story about herself included a wealthy father.

But she also smiled because it was patient and kind, a dodge on Chuck's part. He was obviously full of questions—he had been before she had joined him and Casey to check on the lab. Now, he had even more. He wasn't going to ask them, however. He instead commented on her car. Tired of talking to him as she had been so far, she turned to stare carefully at his Land Rover. They were closer to it than to her car. She could see it well in the pool of light from the light pole. It was old and white—but in good repair, carefully maintained. She spoke, careful to keep laughter in her voice.

"So—this is what computer geniuses drive these days? Seems a bit…well…utility for a man with a Tron poster on his wall."

He gaped at her. "How'd you know? And I'm no genius."

She laughed silently. "Educated guess." She paused. "Good shot, I guess: C4!"

For a moment he looked at her like she was talking about the explosive—but then he understood.

He grinned at her. "You sank my battleship." He deliberately sounded defeated, even as he kept the grin on his face.

"The Land Cruiser belonged to my dad. He left it to me when he died, and it's a tank. I plan to replace it when it fails. But it just keeps running and running and running."

She knew she needed to get away from him. The urge to walk up to him and touch him, to invite him to touch her, had returned in full force. She had to resist it. She had promises to keep, promises she had made to herself. She was not going to open herself up to this sort of pain again. She knew in her bones how much it was possible to hurt. And she'd never reacted to anyone as she did to Chuck. If she opened herself to him and he…failed her…she'd never recover from it.

Chuck was waiting for her reaction; he was poised to walk to her. She had spoken to him without unkindness. Finally. That would have to be enough. She turned her gaze from him and looked into her bag for her keys. As was true earlier when she was walking to the elevator, she knew she was in a precarious position. She needed to be in her car and gone before he closed the distance between them, as he seemed about to do.

She grabbed her keys from the bottom of her bag. When she looked back up, she looked past Chuck to a black SUV that she noticed had just turned into the parking lot. The campus was nearly deserted. The students had gone home for the long weekend. Theirs were the only two cars in the empty lot. But the SUV had turned in and was now picking up speed, hurtling toward them. Sarah stepped to Chuck—he had already taken a step toward her—and she pulled him to her. "Trouble, Chuck!" She punched the button on her key fob at the same time and heard her car doors unlock. She shoved Chuck. "Run!" They ran. "Get in my car!"

He ran around the front of her car and opened the passenger door. He jumped in. She got in the driver's seat and started the car. The SUV came to a screeching halt behind her car. Luckily, there was no impediment to just going forward. She was able to throw the car into gear and punch the gas, heading out of the lot. As she picked up speed, she saw a second SUV enter the lot. The first had gotten rolling again too. The parking lot suddenly became a chess board. It was unclear whether the SUVs could force checkmate; it was also unclear how she and Chuck would escape.

There were two outlets from the parking lot. Each SUV was closer to one than Sarah was. It wasn't clear how she could get out—but it wasn't clear how the SUVs could capture her. She slammed on the brakes, stopping dead center in the parking lot. Each of the SUVs stopped near an exit. So far: pending stalemate.

"Sarah, look, they must want me. I thought no one knew about my research. But maybe someone found out. Let me get out and let them take me. There's no reason for you to get involved in this, no reason for you to get hurt."

She had been staring out of the driver's side window at one of the SUVs when he said that. She heard his seat belt unlatch. She reached over and grabbed his hand: she touched him.

She knew as soon as she did that what she feared had become fact. She felt his touch all the way from her hand to her wrist, up through her elbow and shoulder, down into and across her chest, until it settled deep inside her heart. Chuck.

"The hell you are. I'll get us out of this. Stay in the car, Chuck. And fasten your seatbelt again, it's about to become a bumpy night." Sarah punched the accelerator to the floor and the Mazda hurled forward. She wasn't driving toward either exit. The parking lot was bordered on the side they were heading toward by a standard sort of curb, about five or six inches high. Beyond the curb were a sidewalk and a long border of grass before there was another curb that formed the edge of one of the campus roads. The Mazda was low to the ground. If they impacted the curb head-on, it would likely sheer away the undercarriage of the car.

}o{

Chuck had no idea what Sarah was planning. As they picked up speed, he noticed that one of the SUVs gave up its outpost by the exit and came speeding toward them. Evidently, the driver believed Sarah's plan was to try to hurdle the curb—and the driver expected that maneuver to fail. Chuck's best guess was that the driver wanted to be in position in case they were able to get out of the car and take off on foot. Chuck braced for impact. It was a nice car. It was a shame.

}o{

At the last second, Sarah pushed in the clutch and spun the wheel with one hand, while she yanked up the emergency brake with the other. The little car went into a spin. She brought it out with practiced perfection, put it in gear and they shot past the SUV—out of the lot before the SUV had been able to slow down or turn around.

"Wow," Chuck yelled, his voice cracking. "That was amazing! You're amazing! How did you learn to do that? It was like a scene in a Jason Bourne movie. Wow!" Sarah didn't react to what he said. She was checking the rearview mirror. The SUVs were leaving the parking lot to give chase, but she knew she had gotten away.

Did they see her clearly enough to identify her? Did they get the Mazda's license plate number? She thought both unlikely. They couldn't go to Chuck's place, wherever that was. Could they go to hers? She thought they could go to her place but they shouldn't stay long. If she got him there, maybe she could call someone, turn him over, and maybe she could get back to living her new life. She didn't want to live her old one again, and it looked like she would have to do that if she were to stay with Chuck. She needed to know what was going on.

She ducked the Mazda into a dark strip mall parking lot, turning off her lights as she did so. She drove around the end of the strip of stores to the area in the back where deliveries were made and where dumpsters were stored. She pulled in between a couple of dumpsters, the small car completely obscured from view. She had been far enough ahead of the SUVs to be sure she had not been seen. She turned off her phone without looking at it and removed the SIM card. She told Chuck to do the same. He did.

She looked over at Chuck, but he was looking down at his hand. She had not realized it, but as soon as she had put down her phone and he had too, she had grabbed his hand again. He looked up from their joined hands at her. His face showed delight and confusion

"Um, Sarah, maybe we need to explain some things to each other." She sighed. Maybe so, maybe she should try to figure this out before she made a decision about where to go.

"Why would people break into your lab and try to abduct you, Chuck?"

"I guess because of my new research project." He explained it to her in general terms. It sounded like science fiction to her, but the break-in and the SUVs were no kind of fiction. She believed what he told her, even if she did not fully understand it.

"So there's no physical item they could steal? They need you, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, they'd need me. But they wouldn't get anything out of me. I wouldn't talk."

"Everybody talks…eventually, Chuck. They'd figure out a way to make you talk, and if they didn't, given that you do plan to give it to our government, then they'd just kill you."

She said it as if she were laying out mission parameters, detached and clinical. But Chuck had never heard the end of his life discussed in such a tone. He recoiled from her and jerked his hand from hers. She recoiled from that, both because she had again lost track of the fact that she was still holding his hand, and because of the sting of having him react to her as he had. What was her problem? Her heart was flip-flopping in her chest at the thrill of touching him, but she had just discussed him being killed the way she might discuss discarding a ballpoint pen that ran out of ink.

This—this was one of the reasons she had gotten out. Life and death had started to seem like nothing more than mission parameters. Even her own life had come to seem like a mission parameter to her. She realized at that point that her alienation from ordinary human life was complete. Something had to be done or she would be dead or a complete burnout in another year or two. So she had gotten out. Quit the job and walked. She had arranged a return to civilian life.

She had struggled with the job and what it was doing to her before Bryce. After him, nothing seemed to matter except the mission. Now she was slipping back into that posture again, feeling that familiar low-grade fear, a fear not really for herself, but for the mission itself. But what was her mission now? And although the low-grade fear had returned, it was not the only feeling she was experiencing, not by a long shot. Whatever it was that touching Chuck had sent torpedoing from her fingers to her heart was there too. And not so low-grade. High-grade. But she couldn't express it or even think about it directly without admitting it was there, embracing it to some extent. She didn't want to do that. So she had spoken to Chuck again in a tone that really did not express what she was feeling, reveal the complexity of what she was feeling.

Chuck was looking at her still, his eyes dark with fear and consternation.

"Okay, so they either get what they want from me or they kill me—or, given what you've said and taking its implications seriously—they get what they want from me and they kill me. I guess I knew when I started this project that it would put me in danger. It seemed worth it anyway. I thought maybe I could actually use my talent to make the world a better place instead of just using it to make shitloads of money. That I could do at any point. I just don't care about money."

Trying to remove some of the sting of her previous tone, previous words, Sarah smiled slightly. "I know, I've seen your car."

Chuck had not expected that response. He almost smiled. "How can you drive like you do? How did you know what to do to back up Casey? How do you know what people like those people in the SUVs will do?" The questions he had not asked before were beginning to tumble out now, all at once.

Instead of answering, Sarah pulled the car out from between the dumpsters. She kept her lights off until she had entered traffic. There was no sign of the SUVs. She was going to go to her place and figure out what to do. With Chuck. She was no longer particularly tempted to turn Chuck over. She was not sure she could.

"So, I see how this works. You get to ask me questions and I'm expected to answer them, but I ask, and I get silence in return. Again, I find myself playing a game with you whose rules I don't understand. C'mon, Sarah, say something…say anything! Please..."

She kept her eyes on the road. She could hear a new wariness in Chuck's tone, a new awareness of her. He knew she was not just a colleague he found attractive. She was…more. And he was finding that the more frightened him. This was one reason why, in the past, she had never seriously dated someone who was not part of her world. At some level, she knew she was frightening. The life she led, the things she could do and sometimes had done—well, she didn't fit into ordinary human life, and she doubted any ordinary man could embrace her, the things she could do and sometimes had done. So, except for a couple of deliberately brief encounters, she had been involved only with spies. And she had been involved with few of them. She had been serious only with Bryce, really. She had thought she was in love with him. She had been a fool. Fooled.

}o{

In her early years in the CIA, she had been laser-focused on her career, on her missions. She had liked the job for a while, even loved it: she thought she was doing some good, doing what she thought of as applied politics, making the world a better place, one captured bad guy at a time, one foiled terrorist plot at a time. But as time went on, she became disillusioned. It wasn't that she wasn't doing good sometimes—she was—but it was becoming less clear when she was and when she wasn't. The politics she was applying no longer seemed like abstract ideals worthy of veneration, but like short-term agendas cooked up by long-term bureaucrats. She felt more and more like she was working for the CIA, period. When she signed up, she thought she was working for something like Goodness or Freedom, and doing it by working at the CIA.

When she gave up on Goodness and Freedom, spying had started to seem like a job to her, not a calling. There was no visible honor in it. It was a dark, bloody, dangerous job, when it was not tedious. (It was mostly tedious.) The worthwhile goals of the job had become nebulous if they ever really existed at all. The only obvious goals were money or power—someone's money or power. But by the time she figured that out, the job was all she knew. Even worse, she was good at it and had come to take pride in being good at it. She was so good at it that many believed she was the most talented agent the CIA had.

So, she had let her goals shift—from Goodness to being good at her job, the best. For a long time, she had been able to make do with that, living off her sense of accomplishment and pride, and making herself ignore any questions about what she was good at and whether being good at it was ultimately a bad thing.

All these thoughts raced through her mind as she put the Mazda through its paces. Chuck was still waiting. For a professor, he could keep his mouth shut. Why was he so patient with her? He had to be frightened in so many ways—for his work and for himself. And now he got to endure being frightened of her while she sat in silence and glared at the road ahead of her, checking the rearview now and then to make sure the SUVs had not found them.

She seemed to find it most natural around him to react in ways that confused or frightened or hurt him. She had long worried that she was broken, broken past repair. Wasn't she proving it tonight, hadn't she been proving it since he tried to talk to her at the new faculty party? What whole person reacted as she had?

She knew she needed to talk to Chuck, but her mouth wouldn't open. She glanced at him, and he was watching her. The headlights of a passing car momentarily lighted his brown eyes. She could see a complex of things in his eyes: fear, curiosity, thankfulness…affection. That last made her afraid of him—again. But the Mazda offered no room to run, and they were still about ten minutes from her house.

She forced her mouth into motion. She felt like her own ventriloquist's dummy, her hand somehow inserted into her own back.

"Look, Chuck, you're the issue right now, not me. If you've kept this project in your head and you've told no one about it, then what happened tonight couldn't have happened, or could only have been some kind of mistake—a very weird kind of mistake. Are you absolutely sure you told no one about this? Not at all? Not even maybe in very general terms?"

Chuck sat in silence, thinking. He was quiet for a while. "You know, I've been carrying this project around in my head for a long time. I first had the idea when I was an undergrad at Stanford, but I couldn't quite see how to do it then. I don't recall ever saying anything to anyone about it. I knew even then that the idea could be dangerous. Plus, I don't like people who talk about things they don't know how to do as if they know how to do them. I tend not to share until there is really something to share. Anyway, I can't think of anyone I've talked about this with unless…Shit. But, no, wait, that can't be the source of this."

"What, Chuck?"

He went silent.

}o{

Chuck met Janet Sanders on a beautiful day. Of course. For a long time, in his memory, it had been the most beautiful day of his life. He had been teaching at Stanford for a while, but he started so young that he was still not much older than his students. Some of his graduate students were older than he was. He was sitting under a tree, peeling an orange. He'd finished the sandwich he had brought for his lunch. The day was so warm and his classes were finished, so he was just lolling about for a little while, enjoying being out of the lab—although he knew he would have to go back soon.

As he sat there, he noticed a young woman, probably his own age, so likely not an undergraduate, walking up the sidewalk that ran beside his tree. She had short dark hair. Her eyes were bright green, almost otherworldly. The green was not the green you normally associated with eye color, it was brighter and, somehow, milkier. The color vaguely resembled the color of a matcha latte. Whatever the right description of the color was, her eyes lept out at Chuck, even though she was still quite a few steps away from him on the sidewalk. Perhaps it was because the green was foregrounded against her brown-black hair, but they seemed as if they were out in front of her, as if her eyes met him before she did. He shook his head; it all seemed dreamlike. But no, it was real, she was now about to pass him. Suddenly, she stopped and turned to look at him, her eyes spellbinding up close.

"Hi! Aren't you Chuck Bartowski?" She asked this in a confident, slightly teasing voice.

He hadn't known what to say to that, in part because he seemed to have misplaced English, lost his native tongue. He could find no words. She tilted her head and smiled. That was the end. That smile below those eyes was more than any mortal man could take. His world contracted to that little bit of grass and sidewalk and tree and her and him—and her eyes and smile: there was nothing else in existence. Eventually, he remembered that he did speak English—the other languages he knew were programming languages, and no one spoke those. Oh, and Klingon, but that seemed unlikely to help.

"Yes, I'm Chuck. Or I was. I mean, I will be. Yes, yes, was-am-will be. I'm all the Chuck tenses," He immediately wanted to kick himself.

She laughed, a light, pleasant tinkling sound. "Are you really?"

He just laughed. "Tense? Afraid so."

She laughed and the tree seemed to sway in unison with her laugh, its leaves rustling as if it joined in.

"I'm Janet Sanders. I'm a grad student in Comp Lit. I know about you, your work. I hoped one day to run into you." She smiled again and Chuck felt himself levitate slightly. Up close, she looked like an Elven princess, a Tolkien character enfleshed.

They had chatted agreeably for a while before parting company. Chuck made sure he was positioned beneath the same tree at the same time the next day, but Janet never came.

The next day she did. She stopped to talk again. Chuck found his tongue and his courage at the same moment and asked her if she would like to have coffee with him. They walked to a nearby shop and sat talking until dark.

Janet was fascinating. Talkative, curious, funny. She was almost overwhelmingly articulate. She pushed Chuck in conversation, her mind playing with words, hers and his, constantly. Although Chuck tended to spend his time thinking in numbers and diagrams, he was deeply fond of language, his favorite writers were the greatest players with words, Shakespeare, Dickens, e.e. cummings, and so on. He loved conversations in which the words of the conversation became a part of the conversation. Janet's mind moved naturally and rapidly in just that way, and so they found out about each other that afternoon, both by telling each other things and by playing with the words of they used to tell them.

They went out for the first time that weekend. A few weeks later, they were a couple. They had been a couple for two wonderful years when Chuck asked her to marry him. She said yes. He had been the happiest man in the world. Later, when she refused him, he had been the most miserable.

}o{

Now that he thought about Janet—something he tried not to do anymore—he recalled that he had once talked to her about his idea, about the project. He hadn't said much. He said what he said because there was an analogy between a problem she was working on (the problem of translating poetry without loss from one language to another) and the general nature of decryption. But surely Janet would not have remembered that bit of conversation? And even if she had, why would she ever have told anyone about it?

Sarah turned the car onto a side road and they were officially out of town. He looked out at the trees and the lush green undergrowth shown by the lights of her car.

"I guess I did mention the project once. I mentioned it to Janet Sanders, my old girlfriend. But that was quite a while ago and I really don't think she would even have remembered it. I didn't say much at all, and the conversation was about something else."

"Okay. Well, maybe that's a place to start anyway. Keep thinking about it and let me know if you think of anyone else you might have talked to about it. Girlfriend? Weren't you two engaged?"

}o{

Shit. Sarah wanted to kick herself. Why had she asked that? Now she not only sounded like a bitch, she sounded like a jealous bitch. And she let him know she knew things about him. What must Chuck be thinking? Her tone with him constantly made it seem as if, besides whatever she was saying, she was also telling him sotto voce that she did not want him or resented him. But now she was also suggesting that no one else could have him. Something about the way he said Janet's name had irked Sarah. She was jealous, whether that made any sense or not.

Chuck sighed softly, but she could hear that there was still a tincture of active pain in the sigh—perhaps because the prolonged silence before he named Janet meant that he had been remembering her. That made sense. She knew that she was over Bryce, but active memories of their brief period of good times could still make her melancholy.

"Yes, we were engaged, but that ended. It ended...badly. I haven't seen her in quite a long time and I haven't sought her out. I don't even know where she is or what she's doing."

Sarah was prepared to treat that as a forgivable lie, but something in his voice and manner suggested to her that it was actually true, and suggested something of the struggle that it had involved. Chuck continued to surprise her.

From the beginning, from the moment she met him, although she had not voiced the expectation to herself, she had expected him to be simmeringly defensive, or coolly ironic, or wetly self-pitying, given his fall from academic grace and given the loss of Janet—and given the fact that he knew both were public knowledge—but he seemed like a man with burdens he was willing to carry without taxing others for it. There weren't many men like that—hell, there weren't many people like that.

Sarah turned into the driveway of her house. She had already passed it twice, making sure that nothing seemed out of place. Nothing did. As far as she could tell, it was safe, for now anyway.

It was a small place but made larger by a wraparound porch, the front portion of which was screened in. The house was old—the original structure built before the Civil War. A massive live oak tree stood in the front yard, so massive it looked much more like the house belonged to it than it to the house. Its heavy limbs reached out over the house and almost to the road. It kept the front porch cooler than she had expected.

Sarah had fallen for the house just by seeing pictures on a realtor's website, and it had turned out to be even better when she finally saw it. It was a house ordinary people had lived ordinary lives in for a long, long time. She hoped it might help her to do the same. She spent almost a lot of her time not on campus here, sitting in her rocker on the porch, thinking, drifting, trying not to let feelings that had been in hibernation warm and come back to full life. The live oak seemed responsive to her thinking and drifting and resistance to feeling—and maybe somehow sympathetic to her.

She took walks along the creek that wound behind her house and the other houses in the neighborhood before it splayed out into many small streams and then vanished into muddy swamp waters. She stood there almost every day pondering that muddy water.

Other than when it rained, the creek water at her house was clear. But it was muddy by the time it got to the swamp. She understood the water: she too had started clear and gotten muddy along the way.

She parked the car. She got out and so did Chuck. He was looking in wonder at the live oak. "You know, there are a couple of philosophers who claim that trees actually demand human contemplation, that they compel it. I don't know about that, but I know when I'm in the presence of a life that has mattered and still matters." His tone was reverent. "If I lived here, I'd feel compelled to spend a while on this porch every day," he motioned to the porch, "just contemplating this tree," he motioned back to the tree. Sarah had never thought to put it like that, but it captured her relationship to the tree. Her tree. As she looked at Chuck, she also thought: My Chuck. Her mental tone was reverent. She made herself look away.

Sarah led Chuck through the screen door of the porch. She had old-fashioned metal chairs on the porch, along with a large red wooden rocker—her chair (as she explained to Chuck). Chuck took it all in as they passed through. He was the first person other than Carina to be to the house since she had moved in. Carina had never been anywhere but on the porch. Sarah opened the door to Chuck.

}o{

The Spartan character of the house struck Chuck. There was a smattering of furniture. Nothing that looked plush or comfy. Each piece was clearly carefully chosen and of high quality, but there had been no overt attempt at 'home decorating'. The furniture itself decorated the room to the extent that it was decorated. Over the mantel hung a print, the only thing hanging on the walls. Chuck stopped and studied it in the twilit room. He stood still for a minute or two.

"That's a Chirico, right? One of those sad terraces?"

"Yes, It's one of his metaphysical paintings. 'The Enigma of the Hour.'"

"Right, right. I've seen it in a book, but never knew its name. It seems…lonely. The figure seems to be either crushed or abandoned by time, waiting, waiting..."

Sarah waited to respond. "Yes. The clock in it is always at six minutes 'til three. Time has stopped." She stopped. After a long pause, she made herself put a fear into words, share it with Chuck, her fascination with the painting. "Chuck, if time has stopped...is it impossible to wait or possible only to wait?"

Chuck gave her a deeply puzzled look. Sarah did not stay for an answer. She beckoned him on.

}o{

Chuck followed Sarah as she led him through the house. She moved quickly but without hurrying. She walked to her bedroom. Her bedroom had a queen-size bed in it. It was crisply made, but with no comforter or extra pillows. There was one pillow and a blanket, blue. The blanket was turned down a fold or two, revealing the pillow. There was a heavy brown blanket folded carefully and laid on the foot of the bed. It looked like a Swiss Army red cross blanket: it seemed to have a red stripe with a white cross in the center, although Chuck wasn't sure, given the way it was folded.

Chuck saw Sarah glance at him for a moment, and then at the bed before fixing her gaze back on him. She seemed to become angry at that point and scowled. There was a Shaker-style wooden armchair in the room. A plain nightstand stood on one side of the bed with a functional lamp stationed on it. It looked like a soldier's room—or a nun's. Sarah took her scowl to the closet. She grabbed a book of photos. She sat on the bed and began leafing through it. Chuck stepped to her side and looked at the photos. They seemed to be of Sarah when she was young. Most of them were of her by herself, but in several, a lovely woman (her mother?) or a handsome man (her father?) or both appeared.

Sarah was not looking at the photos, however. She reached into the drawer on the nightstand and retrieved a small pocketknife. She grabbed one of the middle pages and delicately cut it open. It was actually two pages taped together. Inside the pocket formed by the taped pages were two credit cards and two driver's licenses. She grabbed them and put them in her pocket. She flipped a few more pages and went through the procedure again. Two keys. She shut the album and returned it to the shelf in the closet.

Her actions hypnotized Chuck. They walked back into the front room. Sarah went to the coffee table in front of the couch. She picked it up and turned it over. Underneath, and made invisible normally by the skirting of the table, were two pistols—held in place by fastened leather straps. She unfastened them and put them in her bag. She went to an end table and did the same. Three boxes of ammunition were held in place. Chuck started to say something, but she gave him a look that made him choke the words back down.

Sarah opened the closet next to the door and took out an ironing board. It had a brightly striped cover on it. She pulled it back. Then she took her pocketknife back out and cut along the edge of the heavy plastic that wrapped the board itself. She extracted five stacks of bills, two of twenties, two of fifties, one of hundreds. These, too, went in the bag. She turned back to Chuck and considered him. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about something—or maybe more accurately, trying to make sure that she had made her mind up about something. She took out her phone, looked at it without actually turning it on, then she frowned and put it back in her bag.

"Ok, Chuck. We need to make a decision. I've made it clear to you that I'm not...simply an Italian professor. I was a CIA agent for many years, often on deep cover assignments. I've lived a life estranged from normality, ordinariness. I came here hoping to reunite with some of that. It was working…reasonably well, kind of…anyway, until you fell into my lap. You can't stay in town. You need to hide. I know how to hide. One option you have: I'm prepared to take you into hiding. But before we go, if we go, I want to make one stop—at Casey's.

"Your other option is to go to the police. I'll take you there myself. But I'll ask that you leave me out of any story you tell them.

"Maybe that would be your best option—except that it would mean having to let people in on the project, and so you might end up increasing your danger down the line. Or you'd have to lie to the police and come up with another story about how and why you're in danger.

"If you come with me, you'll do as I say, you'll listen to my instructions and you'll trust me. Fail to do any one of those things and you may end up captured or worse.

She made him look at her. She held his gaze for a long time.

"Well, Chuck?"

}o{

Sarah knew her tone had grown icier and icier through what she said. Her final words sounded more like a dare than a question. She knew he had no idea how hard it had been for her to let him in the house, to let him see what he saw. It wasn't just that she didn't want him to see her false ID, her guns, her ammunition, her ready cash: she didn't want him to see the chosen barrenness of her life, its deliberate emptiness. Her house looked attractive and inviting on the outside. On the inside, it was a barracks or a cell—a place of secrets and taut discipline, not of relaxation or unguardedness.

She waited for an answer, offering no further words that might warm the earlier icy ones, no action or gesture or facial expression. She would force him to make his choice this way, with little in the way of encouragement. She'd already held his hand. But she had also already made him take his hand from hers. Better to leave their hands separated. If he was going to go with her, it could not be because he was hoping to…hold hands. Or because she was.

Chuck seemed to stand a bit taller—he really was quite tall, much taller than she was—and he replied, "I'll go with you and do what you say. I'll trust you, as long as you don't give me any reason not to do so."

"I'm not sure those are the term I offered, Chuck. There were no riders, no qualifications, no conditions: Do, Listen, Trust: full stop." She still sounded like deep winter in Alaska.

Chuck stepped to her and took her hand before she could refuse the gesture. The same trill started at her fingers and raced to her heart. She thought about her bed in the other room. She made herself stop that.

"Put yourself in my place. I do trust you. I've sort of been trying to get you to see that since the new faculty party, but you won't stop being hostile or stop running for long enough for me to tell you that. I trust you. But you're...punishing me for it.

"You don't dare someone to trust you, do you? Isn't that close to telling someone to believe something they know is unbelievable? If you have to dare me to trust you, then what I do in response to the dare—whatever it is—it won't be trust. It would be more like playing dumb. Or maybe like playing some grown-up version of Simon Says—call it Sarah Says.

"That's a game I can imagine wanting to play with you," she noticed his eyes flick toward her bedroom, "but not right this minute. Right this minute, I trust you. I understand what you've done for me tonight, so that helps. Still, you've managed to undermine my understanding of almost everything you have done tonight, because while one moment, it seems caring, kind, concerned, the next moment, it seems begrudging, like you're performing a regrettable duty. I don't want to be a burden. I suppose you're the sort of person who does her duty, and I respect that. I really do. I just don't want to be your duty. If you're going to save me, I'd much rather you did it because you want me to be saved."

}o{

She dropped her head during this speech. She was looking at her hand in his and feeling it too. He stooped a bit to get her attention and as he straightened back up, her head went up too, holding the eye contact he made with her by stooping. She was looking into his brown eyes. He asked simply, "Do you want to save me?"

Sarah felt lightheaded, like she had walked too far in noontime Florida heat. Her thoughts about her bedroom started again, worse now because she knew he had it on his mind as well. There was an ache in her core worse than she could ever remember. It had been a long time—a long time. But even more important, it had never been with a man who could…affect her so deeply just by touching her arm or her hand. She wanted desperately to know what it would feel like for him to touch her in…other…places.

Her lightheadedness made her wobbly and she tilted forward, her head still up. He was still looking down at her. Her lips found his and she pressed against him to steady herself. Yes. No.

Anyway, that wasn't what was really happening and (who was she kidding? kissing him did not steady her) it wasn't what she was trying to do. She wanted to kiss him. She parted her lips for him and he kissed her deeply and completely: she felt the kiss echo in every part of her body. She could feel her kiss somehow echo in his too. They were fastened together outside of time. Then her senses returned to her, including what she thought of as her good sense, and she pushed her hand against his chest (her other hand was still in Chuck's) and separated her lips from his.

She looked at him. She had no idea what to say. He did—more or less. "Yeah, ah, well, um, good answer. Like I said, I trust you."

She moved his hand into hers, reversing the structure. She looked down at their joined hands. She pulled him toward the door. "Good. Let's go."

She was lightheaded still. She needed to avoid thinking about that kiss or attending to its continuing reverberations throughout her body and her psyche. She needed herself and Chuck both in seat belts and on the road so that maybe the restraint of her seat belt would compensate for her own steadily failing self-restraint.

But maybe not.